EPA and oil company officials tell Fillmore residents superfund site is not cancer threat

In the early 1980s, when he went to San Cayetano Elementary in Fillmore, Alex Caldera and his friends used to dash off campus at recess to play in the lot on the other side of Pole Creek.

That lot was once a Texaco oil refinery, and today it is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. The soil is contaminated with lead, which causes numerous health problems, and the groundwater underneath has dangerously high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen. Caldera said he remembers playing in the refinery’s old disposal pits, where the highest concentrations of those substances have been found.

On Thursday, Caldera, now 40, was back in his old school’s cafeteria, at a meeting convened by the EPA to talk about the latest plans for the site. The property owner, Chevron, wants to redevelop it with a commercial and industrial complex, but first it needs to clean the soil to EPA specifications and get started on a long-term groundwater cleanup.

About 30 Fillmore residents attended, most of them from the neighborhood around the old refinery. Representatives of Chevron and the EPA and other environmental and public health agencies tried — with limited success — to reassure them that living nearby doesn’t pose any dangers.

The benzene does not threaten the city’s drinking water, since Fillmore gets its water from wells on the other end of town, said Holly Hadlock, the EPA’s project manager for the cleanup. The lead in the soil has not spread from the site either, and isn’t present in high enough concentrations to endanger anyone who visits the site or works on the cleanup, she said.

The message was not received well.

“This is just a publicity thing by Chevron,” said Caldera, who said he worries about developing cancer from his exposure to the site as a child. “It’s the same dog-and-pony show they’ve been giving us for years.”

Chevron has already spent $2 million on cleanup and will probably spend another $8.6 million before the job is done, according to the EPA. The company’s immediate goal is to remove the lead-contaminated soil, so that redevelopment can begin. That project should be done later this year.

Removing benzene from the groundwater will take up to 50 years. The EPA is fine with that timetable, because it is not a source of drinking water, Hadlock said.

Fillmore residents also heard from John Morgan, a professor at Loma Linda University and an epidemiologist with the California Cancer Registry. His recent study of cancer rates in eastern Fillmore showed no elevated risk for people living there.

From 1996 to 2009, there were 422 cancer diagnoses in the census tract nearest the Superfund site — the exact number one would expect, based on typical cancer rates in the region and the demographics of the area. Morgan also studied the rates of specific types of cancer, and all of them were within the range that would be expected due to random chance.

“This community, you can’t say is higher or lower than you would expect,” Morgan said. “There is not a statistical excess of cancer in general or of any type of cancer.”

Many of the residents were not satisfied with his findings. Some asked if cancer cases were clustered near the Chevron property. Morgan said they were not, but he could not share the specific locations of the cancer patients, due to medical privacy laws.

Others wanted to know if the area might have had unusually high cancer rates in the years after the refinery closed, in 1950. Morgan said he didn’t know, and that the answer is unknowable — comprehensive cancer statistics only go back to 1989.

Some residents were frustrated at the very nature of the statistical analysis. Rick Villasenor, a longtime resident of the neighborhood closest to the refinery property, said that someone from almost every family on his street has had cancer. Three people in his immediate family have been diagnosed, including his son, who died of a rare cancer.

“We’re going to the funerals,” Villasenor said. “We’re real people here. We’re not just statistics.”